One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Page 23

  Kyle nodded. It was so obvious. He felt silly that he’d ever questioned it.

  And now he was at war with that dark kingdom, drafted by the other side in spite of, or because of, his own sin.

  Kyle sighed. The life he knew and had spent thirty-eight years living was over. How could it ever be the same after what he’d experienced and seen now? It couldn’t, and this realization brought a depression over him so heavy that it almost forced him to sit down again.

  Seagull cries echoed through the fog from somewhere out over the ocean. A sea otter was working over a clam in the distance, swimming near a small rock that was divorced from the end of a jetty. The smell of salt and seaweed filled Kyle’s nostrils and, mercifully, coaxed him out of his thoughts.

  Everything hurt. He’d racked his shin on a stool while trying to flee the bar. It was now joined in chorus with a dull throb in his neck and shoulders. The worst pain by far was in his back, though, which had been jammed into an unnatural position while he’d slept on the unforgiving surface of the rocks all night.

  His mind kept trying to drift back to the hurricane, so he kept anchoring it in the here and now, in this situation, in what he was going to do next.

  He thought of The Gray Man. Right about now Kyle could use some advice, some further explanation of what he’d seen on that TV screen. Perhaps later. All that mattered was that Tamara was safe. Right now he had to move ahead with helping Victoria.

  With the fog, it was hard to gauge what time in the morning it was, but he was willing to guess it was after eight or so. He needed to get to the Starbucks to camp out for Victoria’s arrival.

  He was only a few blocks away, so after managing to straighten his back, he made his way to the stairs and back up to the boardwalk. Trying the public restrooms, he found them locked, so he decided his best bet for washing up was going to be the Starbucks’ restroom.

  After making his way to the street, he momentarily leaned on a statue of John Steinbeck. A whole town was practically dedicated to this guy, and Kyle could only remember reading one of his short stories, back in high school: The Pearl. According to the plaque at the base of the bust, he at least lived a full life.

  Starbucks was a block up, and when he pushed his way through the door he was met with warmth and the strong aroma of freshly ground coffee beans accompanied by the hiss of a latte machine. The place was busy, but no one seemed to look up as he made a hard left to the restroom. Once inside, he washed his face. Looking into the mirror, he saw that his eyes were heavy now, with dark bags beneath them. He looked like he’d aged ten years.

  While exiting the bathroom, he glanced at a newspaper stand just inside the entrance and was stunned to see a photo of a much younger man who was smiling a big bright smile. He’d been part of some tragedy, and according to the headline in bold letters at the top of the front page, he was a wanted man now, in five states.

  His name?

  Kyle Fasano.

  CHAPTER 25

  Tamara lay in bed trying to convince herself that what had happened the night before hadn’t really happened, but it wasn’t working. Because she knew it had.

  That night, as Tamara slept, she’d been awoken by a sound, soft and close. She tried to open her eyes but realized she couldn’t. In a dreamy and far away place, she tried to command her senses, but only her hearing was left…

  The sound grew closer, to the edge of the bed. It was like a soft hiss-whisper. Her hands were at her sides and she tried to bring them up to her chest, but they were disobedient.

  Dual horrors arose in her mind. Something was in her room.

  And she was completely paralyzed.

  A cold snap spread across her body, up her neck and down to her feet, and she finally felt something: a sea of rolling goose bumps. But her feet, which wanted to run, and her waist, which she was begging to bend and allow her to sit up, were arrested.

  The bed moved and then sunk a bit. Someone was there.

  Inside she screamed, but that’s where the scream stayed, in her mind alone, like a trapped echo. Her mouth wouldn’t open and her vocal cords were dead. Like she would be. Soon.

  Whoever was in her room had malicious intent. It emanated evil. Her mind raced. Was it a rapist? A murderer? My God, where are the kids!? Where’s Trudy?

  All her thoughts came to a complete stop when she felt a hand with very sharp nails grip her thighs and begin to spread her legs, ever so slightly.

  Oh. My. God.

  It was a rapist then. Some sick monster. But, oddly, she divided these perceptions so that the word “monster” was held up in her mind as the greater truth. Yes. The things lightly combing up and down her thighs weren’t fingers.

  They were claws.

  She begged her eyes to open, her arms to rise, her legs to close. Pleaded and begged. Screamed to them. Nothing.

  Then the caressing stopped and the bed began to move again, sinking on either side of her, as whatever it was sat across her chest.

  She couldn’t breathe now and her body shuddered in revulsion.

  She had to do something, but she couldn’t. It was that simple, and yet beyond comprehension. How could this be happening? As if everything going on with Kyle wasn’t enough? God was now going to let her be raped too?

  A moment of wishful clarity came to her: this was all a dream. Yes. That was it.

  Hadn’t she read about this phenomenon somewhere? It happened to most everybody, usually when you were under a lot of stress. It was the “mind/body glitch.” The mind, as part of the process of preparing a person for sleep, suspended the signals to the body’s nervous system briefly, right before it slid into the REM stage. But sometimes the process was interrupted and a person partially awoke, not conscious enough to restart the body but conscious enough to be aware of one’s surroundings. And if this happened during the dream state? The two worlds could collide, and that’s all this was: a figment of her imagination.

  That had sharp buttocks that were now sliding off her chest and on to her stomach.

  Jesus! This is real.

  The thing grabbed her breasts and squeezed them softly, and this was worse, because it was sexual and intimate, not rough and forced, and the nails were not cutting into her but flitting over her chest and up to her neck.

  Okay. Okay. Fine. If I’m going to be raped, then fine. But please, God, protect the kids, please…

  Terror sprang up in her like a jack-in-the-box in her brain. Not Janie! Please, God. No. No. No. She’s still a baby. Still a little girl. Please.

  She felt a sudden exhalation of breath on her face, the sickly sweet smell of maggots on meat. Her stomach churned with nausea. Then the claws were on her breasts again, and just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, not in a million years, it spoke.

  “Soft,” it said, “like plums.”

  Her mind began to go black, and then fought back.

  Was that Georgie’s voice? Georgie Wilson? Who used to torture her when she was young by making fun of her breasts before they “came in,” as her Aunt Leona used to say. It had to be. Tamara was a woman now, with a full chest. No one had called them “plums” in a long time. And if it was Georgie’s voice, then this was a nightmare.

  The monster chuckled softly into her ear and Tamara wanted to sob. It wasn’t Georgie’s voice. Just his words. Being uttered now by this creature, which was somehow turning her own mind and memories against her.

  There was a sudden shift in the room, the sound of air thumping hard against the drapes, and Tamara sensed they weren’t alone anymore. Someone else was there.

  She felt the head of the thing that was on her snap to one side, and then the creature began to climb off her. She heard its feet hit the carpet next to the bed, on Kyle’s side.

  The room went silent, and whatever was happening now had little or nothing to do with her. There was no commotion, no struggle. Just silence. As if she were a fly on the wall in a room where two things were just staring at each other. Then whatever it was that
had come to torment her seemed to leave, or disappear, or something. She couldn’t tell. She just knew the fear in her was waning.

  She felt herself coming back, coming alive, and the nerve endings in her body beginning to vaguely spark. She rushed the sensation to her eyes, wanting to see who had come to save her.

  Her right eyelid fluttered open just in time for her to catch a glimpse of him, a tall glowing man in a gray suit, just as he melted through the French doors of her bedroom and back outside. The first word that came to her mind for him was “power” and she was flooded with emotions before she passed out…

  Now, as she forced herself to get out of bed, the truth was as self-evident as the day before her.

  A monster had come to kill her. She’d prayed for help, and God had sent someone.

  There was no trying to wish it away into any dream or nightmare.

  Because dreams don’t allow for monsters, nor nightmares any rescuing angels.

  NAPOLEON TRIED to hold his mind together, but it was like trying to hold a bag of marbles with a hole in it: shit was threatening to spill out everywhere. It was a little after eight in the morning, and fog surrounded their car on the turnoff where he and Parker had stopped the night before to get some shut-eye. They’d passed out cold, but now, as Parker snored away next to him, Napoleon was lost in thought.

  How he was ever going to continue this investigation or focus on this case was beyond him. The only approach left was the oldest one in the book: one step at a time. Any wasted effort at worrying or obsessing over things was useless. If he was losing it, then he could get a psych eval and some help when this case came to a close.

  If he wasn’t losing it? Then his mind was the least of his worries.

  He thought of his tattoo of the praying hands. Yes, that made sense. If what happened in that bathroom was real, then it was time to pray alright. Hard. He was surprised how easily, after a lifetime of using and relying on them, his skeptical, analytical and investigative instincts were being swept aside.

  Like any good cop, what he saw was usually what he relied on. But Napoleon had honed his instincts too, over many cases in his career. There was no need to over-analyze what had happened. That… thing, creature, whatever the hell it was… had been there, as real as the lights, white tiles and lingering scent of piss in the bathroom. It spoke to him and he grabbed hold of it with his bare hands and… felt it. It was a physical presence that was more like a mass of vibrating atoms than it was a person of any kind, as if he grabbed ahold of a ghost.

  He’d never had a panic attack before but he’d heard descriptions of them, and what he was experiencing was pretty close to one; his mouth was dry and he was short of breath, his chest felt heavy, and internally he wanted to run in every direction, all at once.

  He heard the trucker’s voice again: “Drive back home. Stay there. Die lonely.”

  Yes. That was a splendid idea. He could retire early, get eighty percent of his pension and help coach Efren’s baseball team. He could watch his little nephew grow up, graduate high school, go off to college, start his own life and… mostly forget about his uncle. This was the likely scenario, if Efren’s mother didn’t cut Napoleon off altogether for some reason, which was always a distinct possibility.

  That was her right, because no matter how hard Napoleon pretended, Efren was not his son. He would never have a son or a daughter, or much of a life at all really. That thing was right. Dying alone was most certainly going to be his end someday.

  He decided against praying. What was the use? How many times had he been to a crime scene and seen the anguish of a shattered mother or brokenhearted wife, bent over the dead body of their gang-member son or husband, wailing over why their prayers had never been answered?

  No. He wouldn’t pray. Because guessing which ones would or wouldn’t be answered was the ultimate display of human futility.

  Of desesperación.

  No. Don’t. Don’t think of Esperanza now too. You’ll be in a bottle within the hour.

  He took a deep breath and held it, trying to refocus. All he had was the job and, right now, this case. Napoleon had never walked away from a fight in his life, and he wasn’t going to start now. Be it with Kyle Fasano or with that mirror creature, Napoleon was going to throw down, to the bitter end.

  Because, really, he had nothing to lose.

  When Parker finally awoke, they both got out of the car and pissed into the fog before heading down the road and pulling off at a small diner, where they loaded up on breakfast and coffee.

  “Okay, Parker. Full night’s rest. Full stomachs. Deputy Kendall is probably up now. Time to push on.”

  Parker only nodded weakly, his face a mask of exhaustion as they made their way back to the car and began the drive.

  It wasn’t long before their Caprice pulled into the parking lot of the Beaury Library. Waiting for them in his cruiser was Kendall, reading the paper as he sat in the front seat. He got out to greet them. “Mornin’, fellas!” he said with an exaggerated southern accent.

  “Morning,” Parker replied as he got out of the car.

  Napoleon’s seat belt was jammed, so it took him a second longer to join them. After nodding a hello to Kendall, he looked at the library before him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go back inside after what had happened last time, and while he was in his current state. If Fasano had left any other cryptic clues about Napoleon’s past, there was a real chance Napoleon was going to snap once and for all. But he had no choice. They’d overlooked something last time; he was sure of it.

  Kendall rustled the keys up from his pocket. When he turned the key in the lock of the big metal double doors of the library, a loud click rattled into the air. The interior of the library was lit with muted sunlight that spilled through the windows and reflected off the used-books racks just inside the entrance.

  “So what do you think you’re after?” Kendall asked.

  “We’ll know it when we find it, deputy. Thanks for your help,” Napoleon replied, implying that he and Parker would take it from here. Noted and received, Kendall stayed at the front desk, which was a relief to Napoleon. He had just as much right as Parker and Napoleon to look at the computers and be part of the investigation; it was all going down in his jurisdiction. But Kendall didn’t seem to know this, which was a good thing, because the fewer people involved the better.

  When they were almost to the computer island, Parker spoke softly. “So, we got seven computers we didn’t get to. You good with this?”

  Napoleon was irritated. “I know how to do a damned computer search.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know that too. Forget about it. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, then. How ’bout we take a computer at either end, then work our way to the middle?”

  Napoleon nodded.

  As often was the case when you were in a hurry, nothing came quickly and nothing was easy. It was as if the universe liked to be the cat and treat you like a ball of yarn.

  The first four computers yielded nothing. The fifth wouldn’t start and needed to be rebooted, and while it was coming back to life, the sixth computer seemed to have promise. Parker found a bunch of searched articles for the Grand Canyon, but they proved to be for somebody’s school project, since they were linked back to a homework assignment website for the local junior high.

  The seventh computer was Napoleon’s, and he stretched his neck and shoulders as he began digging through the search history for the day Fasano had been there. After a sea of typical teenager-type searches of hot models and video game articles, there were a series of visits to a website for Khan Academy, where someone was clearly catching up on biology class. Before long though, Napoleon thought he found something.

  There were searches now that were far more specific and targeted at someone named “Victoria Duncan,” from general information like her age and her marriage, to more specific information like her home address.

  “Finally got this one up
and running again,” Parker said, his fingers flying across the keyboard of the computer he’d been forced to restart.

  “Fine. Finish up, but I think I’ve got something.”

  Parker stopped typing and leaned over. “Yeah? What?”

  “Around the exact time Fasano was here and dicking around with that other computer, someone was on this one digging up information on some woman about his age, I think. I dunno yet. I’m working a little deeper into the Google pages to confirm a birth date, but that’s an odd coincidence, don’t ya think?”

  “And you don’t believe in coincidences?”

  Napoleon chuckled wearily. “Not even on a good day.”

  Parker rubbed his chin, and then leaned back over his computer.

  As Napoleon dug, he hit Classmates.com. Breaking out his credit card, he signed up for the service knowing that the “one month free” wasn’t really free when you gave someone the right to bill you up front for the second month. He didn’t care. He filled out his info and ignored his own high school—a third of his class was either dead or in jail anyway—then steered his way to the page of Victoria Duncan, who was now Victoria Brasco.

  Then he searched for a Kyle Fasano.

  Bingo.

  She and Fasano went to the same school and graduated the same year. Seeing that it was an extra charge but not caring, he ordered the online yearbook that was available.

  After a moment or two, Napoleon could only shake his head. Here it was, all they needed.

  Napoleon knew he should be relieved to finally have caught a break, but instead he was pissed, especially when he went back and clicked further into the search history and saw that Fasano also searched the bus schedules from Beaury to Monterey, where “coincidentally” Brasco now lived. A round trip drive to San Diego could have been entirely avoided if they’d just been more thorough. If Parker had—